Beach Read, You Say...
whatever takes you away and gets you lost
Summer means down time (on a lounge chair or in an airplane seat) and that means summer reading. The lists are popping up.
Several years back, when Slate was putting together a roundup of authors and their favorite beach reads, Michael Chabon gave a tidy answer, “I don’t change what I read when I go to the beach or on a vacation. I just read more.” But because of marketing, beach reads are usually thought of as books that focus on easy engagement and avoid weighty themes. This is writing, we’re told, meant to match the mood of warm weather and leisure days. Something slim with a tight plot fits the ideal.
My own idea of a beach read is whatever takes you away and gets you lost for the better part of an afternoon. But thinking of writing that’s meant to be lightweight reminds me of pleasures that might be called small and humble. A tight plot sits in good company with anything under the umbrella of the nine Muses that’s condensed or stripped down, and chock full of energy. Garage Rock. Haiku. The Texas Two-Step. A classic baking soda and vinegar volcano. The iPhone commercial that aired over Christmas in 2013 and made everyone cry.
The concise—the small, the miniature—often draw us in, not in spite of their size, but because of their pared down dimensions. What’s been left is the very opposite of diluted. Lia Purpura (also pondering “shortness in prose”) has set down the best list of objects that deftly “transcend their size” in her essay “On Miniatures.” Dense chunks of fudge and espresso and dollhouses and snow globes and bonsai trees. I do love charm bracelets (especially ones with vintage pieces that have moving parts, like 14K baby grand pianos that open like real ones, impossibly small scissors that are operational, and wishing wells with handles that turn), and a Faberge exhibit I saw at NYC’s Metropolitan Museum has me forever obsessed with the tiny landscapes folded within the Imperial Danish Palaces Egg.
In writing, compression demands that no word, no side plot, nothing is unneeded. Good, crisp storytelling can pop up in many forms. In six words, Hemingway made flash fiction famous: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” A country ballad (preserved in the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry) melds fragments of a dinnertime conversation with a heightening mystery about a local boy’s jump from a bridge. Laura Hillenbrand’s obituary for Dick Cole, the 103-year-old veteran of the famed World War II bombing attack of Japan, is just about a page long and jam-packed with heroism and adventure:
Lt. Dick Cole stood over the open escape hatch of a B-25 bomber, gripping his parachute cord and looking down into 9,000 feet of seamless black. It was the night of April 18, 1942, and the plane, bucking in a roiling storm, had just led one of the most audacious and unlikely missions of World War II—the first Allied bombing of Japan. Now, out of fuel over China, the bomber was doomed. Cole dived out headfirst and vanished.
Summer reading, perhaps, is not about one category of book, its size, or its heft, but about the compression of time in those precious weeks that interrupt our nine-to five-lives, a whiff of privacy at a lake or on a beach when we’re finally alone with our TBR pile.
Speaking of those months without “r” (when it’s unsafe to eat oysters), here's a catalog of summer reads complied by
and , all written by authors on Substack, including a new thriller from Andrea, a historical novel from set on Martha’s Vineyard during World War II, a romance about a former child actress by , a gothic mystery by , and a crime novel by yours truly. It’s a mini library of genre. So honored to be included.My first review of Nightswimming
Nightswimming received in coverage in the trade publication Kirkus this week and I’m happy to share this with you:
“Debut novelist Anagnos sweats so many procedural details of Jamie’s painstaking investigation that you’ll sweat along with him. The real star of this show is Paterson, which feels as menacing, vivid, and multilayered as Walter Mosley’s Watts."
For your beach read consideration: Nightswimming is available to preorder from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Bookshop.org, or directly from my publisher High Frequency Press.
This Week’s Recommended Reading
“‘We'll Make it Short Nonfiction.’" A Chat with Dinty W. Moore, Editor-in-Chief of Brevity”
This Week’s Recommended Listening
"I Fought the Law" by Bobby Fuller (on Amazon Music and Spotify)
Just One More Thing
What’s your go-to book recommendation? Or the best book you’ve read on a recommendation?
Because you’ll want to know, here’s mine—Hey, Kiddo: A Graphic Novel by Jarrett J. Krosoczka (recommended to me by Lori, who’s pretty close to infallible).
